Victor Solberg

If you accidentally leave your computer somewhere, chances are it’s gone for good. Especially if whoever finds it doesn’t know who it belongs to. I’m not saying that everybody would return a computer they found if they could easily do so. But I am saying that you’ve got a better chance if you make it simple for the finder.

I have changed my Windows account name to my email address so that the first thing someone who switches on my computer sees is my picture and email address. Windows 7 doesn’t normally allow account names longer than 20 characters, but there’s a workaround:

1. Go to All Programs > Administrative Tools > Computer Management

2. In Computer Management, go to System Tools > Local Users and Groups > Users

3. Change the “Full name” of your user account to your email address.

You’ve now changed the rather useless Windows account name to something useful - contact information in case you should be so unlucky as to lose your computer. Let’s hope it never has to be used *knock on wood*.

Gmail’s spam feature does a good job at capturing most of the spam I receive. It marks those emails as spam, which shows up as a label with an unread count, effectively telling you every single time you open your email that you are receiving a large amount of spam. I find this to be distracting. Not very distracting - just a little bit - but every time I open my email.

I don’t like clutter in my email so I clean out my inbox on a daily basis. That leaves my inbox empty, but there’s still the distraction of the spam. I do occasionally go through and see if the emails are actually spam, but I don’t want to do it very often. And I want it to be when I have time, not when I see that I should. My solution is to hide Gmail’s spam count.

Step 1:Open Settings (top right corner) and click on Filters.

Step 2: Choose search criteria

In the “Has the words:” field you write in:spam.

Leave the rest of the fields blank.

Step 3: Choose action

Select Mark as read.

You can also choose to have the spam deleted immediately, which might be a good option if you never get non-spam email in your spam folder. I, however, don’t want my filter to be quite that drastic. I just want to hide the spam count.

There you go. No more distractions!